Facebook, Twitter, Apple in hacker sights

Burger King, Jeep Twitter pages hacked; Google password warning

BenjaminPimentel

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Suddenly, security has become a pressing concern among technology’s highest-profile players.

Apple

Macbook Pro.

A few days after Facebook Inc.
FB, -4.71%
disclosed that it was hit by a “sophisticated attack,” Apple Inc. said it had also suffered a security breach, according to a published report.

Apple
AAPL, -0.77%
said a small number of employee-owned Macintosh computers were breached, adding that the company is working with law-enforcement agencies on the problem, according to a report by Reuters.

On Friday, the social-networking site Facebook said it had been breached after some employees went to a mobile developer’s website, which turned out to have been compromised. The company said it found “a suspicious domain,” which it then tracked to an employee’s laptop. The laptop was discovered to house “a malicious file.” See story: Facebook hacked in 'sophisticated attack.'

The Apple breach came against the backdrop of what appeared to be a wave of high-profile attacks on the Twitter feeds of notable companies.

The official Twitter page of Jeep was apparently hacked Tuesday, a day after Burger King’s account suffered a breach. The Twitter page for the @Jeep account showed the company logo with the words, “Just Empty Every Pocket, Sold To Cadillac.”

On Monday, Burger King’s Twitter page was changed to read, “Just got sold to McDonalds because the whopper flopped.” A Twitter spokesman said the social-media site does not comment on individual accounts. A Jeep spokesman told MarketWatch that the company is aware of the issue and is working to resolve it as soon as possible.

Tuesday also brought a warning from Google Inc.
GOOG, -2.09%
which said in a security-update blog post that cybercriminals are increasingly focused on stealing passwords to break into Google email accounts as a way to send spam users. In the blog post, Google said that it has seen “a large increase in fraudulent mail sent from Google accounts” since 2010, when “spammers started changing their tactics.”

The update posted by Google security engineer Mike Hearn observed: “With stolen passwords in hand, attackers attempt to break into accounts across the web and across many different services. ... We’ve seen a single attacker using stolen passwords to attempt to break into a million different Google accounts every single day, for weeks at a time. A different gang attempted sign-ins at a rate of more than 100 accounts per second.”

Google posted the warning to highlight what the company said were its recent successes in preventing hacking attacks.

The company said its security team has developed a system that “performs a complex risk analysis to determine how likely it is that the sign-in really comes from you.”

Google said such measures had helped cut the number of compromised accounts by nearly 100% “since the peak of these hijacking attempts in 2011.”

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